ANNALS OF IMMIGR.ATION THE LOTTER.Y Once you have a green card, what next? BY DAN BAUM R aúI Jaràs grandfather tilled a rich man's land on the outskirts of Lima, Peru, until agrarian reform in the nineteen-sixties made four acres of it his. By the time Raw was born, in 1971, Lima had grown to surround the J aras' compound, making their walled garden of bananas and bougainvillea an oasis from the increasingly chaotic and pol- luted capital city. Raúl, an only child, was the first member of his family to go to college, and six times a week he would travel an hour and forty-five minutes by minibus to an oasis of another kind, the campus ofPontificia Catholic University, where he and his fellow engineering stu- dents immersed themselves in the elegant exactitude of mathematics. Peruvians like to say that they have the worlås best- educated taxi -drivers, because only a fraction of Peruvian college graduates find professional jobs. Raúl was an ex- ception. After graduation, he worked as a teacher of computerized industrial drawing, then as an engineer at a gold mine, until, finally, he was hired at a cop- per mine set more than thirteen thousand feet up in the Peruvian Andes. Peru's per-capita gross domestic prod- uct is less than that of Namibia or the Dominican Republic, but the Anglo- Australian Tintaya copper mine is a de- cidedly First World operation. The man- made canyon of the open pit is bordered by a spodess miniature city-neat work- ers' houses with flowers out front, gar- den apartments, a chapel, a hotel, a hos- pital, a health club, and office buildings. The rules of conduct are enforced with the rigor of a military academy: no walk- ing in the street, no crossing outside the zebra stripes, no smoking, and orange vests and hard hats required everywhere. The minès obsessive rectitude, amid the nearly uninhabited high grassy plains and snow-capped mountains of southeast- ern Peru, is as anomalous as a moon col- ony in a science-fiction story. Engineers at Tintaya work in cubicles, each with \ \ I \' / / ß../ : ili w ), / I / /;1 , / ") - \ a late-model I.B.M. ThinkPad attached to a nineteen-inch L.C.D. monitor, their whiteboards covered with dizzying graphs, parabolas, and complicated equa- tions. When Raúl started at Tintaya, as a geotechnical engineer, he examined soil samples and computed the angle at which to cut the wall of the pit, and then, as an ingeniero de costos, he analyzed the budget iT ) , , i?Jj) )-- \ ., Though happy in his job, Raúl yearned for a life as orderly as the mine, for a country that funded education and parks, regulated air pollution and noise, and po- liced its own lawmakers. Once, when Raw and some other engineers made a road trip to Chile, he noticed that in Peru the driver gleefully exceeded the speed limit, passed on the right, even blew through stop signs, but in Chile he was careful not to speed, and was scrupu- lous about stop signs and railroad cross- ings. "They have laws here," the man said. When a colleague went to work in Canada, Raw asked his boss about the possibility of a transfer, but he was told that he didn't speak English well enough. On one of Raúr s four-day furloughs 'I _æ II Unlike many immigrants, lottery winners often have no jàmily or job in the States. and developed new projects. He worked twelve-hour shifts ten days in a row, and earned thirteen hundred dollars a month, almost ten times the minimum wage. During his four days off: he would travel twenty-three hours by bus over rough roads back to Lima, where his friends and relatives would welcome him with a pachamanca, a feast of meats cooked slowly underground. 46 THE NEW YORKER, JANUARY 23 & 30, 2006 in the fall of 2002, he was walking in downtown Lima with his girlfriend, Li- liana Campos, a willowy beauty with the graceful half-moon nose of her Inca ancestors. Lily, as she is called, was then twenty-five and living with w Raúl's parents while she studied to be a nurse. A red-white-and-blue sign o caught their attention: "Sorteo de Visas!" Every autumn, storefront businesses